Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Maybe you would prefer that we take Joelle’s side in ALL CAPS?

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Let there be snark.

No one could have predicted…

Trump’s legal defense is going to be a dumpster fire inside a clown car on a derailing train.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.

Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you don’t.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

You are here: Home / Archives for Balloon Juice / Make The World A Better Place

Make The World A Better Place

A little YIMBY win

by | 53 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

Last night, the Chapel Hill Town Council voted 6-3 to modify the town’s land use management ordinance (LUMO).  The big change is to allow by right duplexes and cottage apartments on most of the land that had been zoned as of yesterday morning as detached single family housing only plots.  Other chunks of the proposal made it easier for triplexes and quadplexes to be approved in areas that are already zoned for multi-family housing.

The intent of this process change is to modestly (and I mean modestly) increase density and new construction in pre-existing neighborhoods.  Most of Chapel Hill once you get more than half a mile from the UNC campus is car dependent suburbia.  These neighborhoods have been built during periods of very restrictive and structurally exclusionary zoning which made building with any density difficult.  There had been a few windows in the town’s history in the past two generations where some density was temporarily allowed and those periods have created most of the current inventory of not outrageously expensive housing.

The driver of the change is a simple recognition that the town is part of a rapidly growing region.  There is massive demand for housing in the greater Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle.  Home prices are soaring and a lot of construction is happening in green fields 40 to 60 minutes of daily driving away from the job centers. The new construction in town has mostly been either single family detached housing at a half million or more price points or 5+1 apartment blocks where studio apartments start at $1500/month.  The newly allowed housing concepts aims to allow for within neighborhood construction of smaller and more affordable housing units. In Chapel Hill, the limited construction  means home prices have sky rocketed.  My family bought our home in 2019 in Chapel Hill.  We could not afford to buy the same property today even if I was working at my regular salary instead of my grad student stipend.

Will it solve every housing problem in the town?

HELL NO!

Is it a reasonable step in a direction to increase supply and relieve some of the price pressure as well as reduce regional vehicle miles driven on the margin?

HELL YES!

Has it been an ugly ugly fight for a necessary but grossly insufficient step?

YEP!

Is this a political fight that should be taking place in pretty much every town that is home to a flagship state university/med school complex?

INDUBITABLY!

This has been one of the things that I’ve been spending some of my time and attention on besides grad school and instead of health policy writing over the past six months as I think it is important to live our values by changing policy.  Zoning determines whether or not diversity and inclusion is a slogan or a reality.

A little YIMBY winPost + Comments (53)

Acts of Kindness: We Are All Flavored Differently

by | 89 Comments

This post is in: ,

Trying to rejoin the living. I was waylaid by a terrible flu at the end of April/beginning of May and it’s just dragged on for weeks. Meanwhile, adulting didn’t stop – broken dishwasher, mysterious code on the car that the service techs can’t figure out, topped off with back-to-back wind/hail storms that shredded my roof. AND I had just planted my tomatoes and peppers – luckily I only lost one tomato. The walls of water saved the day.

So, I’ve been busy. Right now making quick decisions on house colors so we can get the right gutters up that won’t need to be painted. The roof is a no-brainer – it’s very light grey now and we’ll be going as light as possible because light roofs make life better (see info here).

Don’t know how much posting I’ll be doing, but hopefully, this will remind you there are good things out there.

I’ve been trying to stay far from Twitter, so lots of YouTube – I don’t usually recommend blocking ads, but it really helps if you’re watching a lot of videos. YMMV.

Let’s get started!

Nibby!

====================

An Ohio dad found a sweet way to ensure that his kids with special needs have employment opportunities — and now their business has become a community favorite!

Joel Wegener told NBC affiliate WLWT that he decided to buy an ice cream truck in April after realizing that it may be a challenge for his two adult kids, Josh, 18, and Mary Kate, 21, to receive a job offer because they both have Down syndrome.

“It started out as an idea to sell ice cream, now it’s so much bigger than that,” explained Joel, who also shares eight other biological children with his wife Freida.

“Mary Kate just finished up at Pathways [a program for individuals with varying abilities] and when people asked her, she’s always said, ‘I wanna work with Papa,'” he added to the outlet. “But then when we started talking about this ice cream business, it was just a natural [thing] to bring her in and also bring Josh in.”

====================

I swear, in my head, I posted a full thread about Great Dane therapy dogs, but it looks like that never happened, so I’ll sprinkle all the videos I have through subsequent kindness posts. Here’s the first one:

====================

show full post on front page

Acts of Kindness: We Are All Flavored DifferentlyPost + Comments (89)

Acts of Kindness: Small Steps Making Lives Better

by | 30 Comments

This post is in: ,

It finally feels like spring here and I’ve been out in the garden almost every day, which has really elevated my mood and energy. So it felt like time to do the same here with another good news post.

=======================

The fact that Temple Grandin lives a short drive from here makes me smile, every time she’s in the news.

===============

I rarely ever, ever, ever recommend reading YouTube comments, but the comments on this video about the maternal care center were almost as good as the video good news:

=======================

Moose enjoys some popcorn, skips the movie

KENAI, Alaska (KTUU) – When a new patron stopped by the Kenai Cinemas on Wednesday night, he wasn’t interested in showings for “The Pope’s Exorcist,” “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” or “John Wick: Chapter 4.″

Instead, this visitor only wanted to indulge in one particular concession stand snack.

“Our popcorn had him enticed,” Kenai Cinemas General Manager Ricky Black said. “He was pretty focused on that. I guess he was tired of eating bark for the winter.”

A young moose entered the cinema around 9 p.m. and stayed for about five minutes, Black said. Surveillance video shows the moose sniffing around the concession stand before following his nose to a nearby tray of popcorn left by the trash can. The moose had his nose in a trash can, at one point getting his nose and mouth stuck inside a spent McDonald’s Happy Meal box.

“They were just letting some of the cold air in, and that’s how this happened,” said Black, whose niece was also working at the time. “We prop the door open quite often during this time of the year because it’s just so nice outside, and you want to let some of that fresh air in.”

Black and another employee were able to direct the moose to the exit. Black, who is from Arkansas, said the event was a cool thing to experience, especially as he and his niece Jasmynne are new to Alaska.

“We both think this is just so awesome,” he said, “because we’re both just kind of fascinated with moose in general. Like, we’re still in that new-to-Alaska phase.”

He said the situation would have been much different had an adult moose stopped by.

“I would not have the same reaction to a bull moose in rut season, or a mama moose,” Black said.

=======================

========================

This is one of my favorite things, I make sure to DVR it because it reminds me every night that there is so much good out there:

We’ve built playgrounds, houses, helped animal shelters, provided kids with toys, filled in-school stores with free food and supplies kids can take home, filled food banks, given people living in cars a safe place to park, helped a volunteer fire department..and so much more. Almost 11 million raised in 3 years, $5 at a time.

=====================

I know someone sent this to me – I think either Steeplejack or HumboldtBlue sent it, as they send me happy stuff at least once a day:

===================

I made Key Lime Coconut Bars yesterday, they are so yummy. (Recipe here)

Acts of Kindness Draft

I have no pet pix for you today, but here’s my garden finally starting to show some color. This is the front yard, where I took out the grass and planted native plants. These bulbs are actually from the previous owner and the fact they survived the upheaval and seem to thrive delights me.

Acts of Kindness Draft 1

 

That’s it for this edition. Share your good news in the comments. And as always, be kind, especially to yourself.

Acts of Kindness: Small Steps Making Lives BetterPost + Comments (30)

Tiny Home Communities for the Unhoused

by | 173 Comments

This post is in: ,

I was looking for information about when our tiny home community would come to fruition and I went WAAAAYYY down a rabbit hole of hopefulness. So I thought it would make a good Saturday afternoon post.

This amazing project gives temporary homes to veterans who are looking to get back on track. Sometimes, all it takes is a period of time for people to get back on their feet, these project attempts to do just that. These tiny homes are designed with the veteran in mind and the Tiny Home Tours team was happy to donate to the cause.

 

This opens this summer in my town:

We have an excellent food bank/homeless center and folks around here, including law enforcement, work hard to help the unhoused, not arrest them or do sweeps.  This is project is an extension of that. I suspect if it’s successful it will be expanded for other housing needs.

Jennifer Seybold, executive director for Veterans Community Project (VCP) Longmont, said they are building 26 tiny homes for unhoused veterans on two acres of donated land. They hope to have it open sometime in June.

“It’s a transitional housing community. People can stay here for up to two years,” said Seybold.

Since 2020, Seybold said VCP has permanently housed 61 veterans in the northern Colorado area with an 85% success rate.

==========================

This one has the neighborhood excited to be involved and really could be a model for all:

show full post on front page

Tiny Home Communities for the UnhousedPost + Comments (173)

Acts of Kindness: Running with Love

by | 29 Comments

This post is in: ,

A little bit of kindness to start the week.

Today was the Boston Marathon, and as someone who participated on various levels (including running a couple of qualifiers and handing out water in the rain just before “heartbreak hill”), I always look forward to this day. Boston.com runs a series of stories about “why I’m running” and they are always heartfelt. (My reasons for running were much less altruistic and much more “about a guy” – hey whatever gets you off the couch).

This one was one of the best:

BOSTON —

The legacy of Dick and Rick Hoyt is living on along this year’s 26.2-mile Boston Marathon route thanks to the drive and determination of two Massachusetts athletes.

Michael DiDonato and Kyle Brodeur never planned to run the Boston Marathon, but when you hear their story. It feels like this is their destiny.

show full post on front page

Acts of Kindness: Running with LovePost + Comments (29)

Good News and Acts of Kindness

by | 36 Comments

This post is in: ,

Had a few kindness/good news items bookmarked and it felt like a good day share them. Just got back from seeing my dad, after a long winter of not being able to travel across the frozen mid-west. He’s home and doing great. Brightened my entire mood.

So thought I’d share the feeling – here are tonight’s offerings:

Listen to this one with CC on – it’s super quiet and difficult to hear.

Feb 6, 2021  Greenwood football’s motto this season was “We Over Me.” There might not be a better testament to that message than this story. The team surprised its janitor, Jamie Freeman, who has cerebral palsy with his own state championship ring this week.

=================

This will be the 10th anniversary of the bombing of the Boston Marathon….

27 nonbinary athletes are running the Boston Marathon. The division is a ‘sanctuary’ amid a rise of anti-trans legislation.

‘There’s nothing more empowering than reclaiming our bodies that have been, in so many ways, weaponized against us.”

Cal Calamia
Cal Calamia is running the 2023 Boston Marathon in the inaugural nonbinary division. Ariel Robbins

Dialynn Dwyer

When Cal Calamia takes off from the starting line in Hopkinton on Monday to run the 2023 Boston Marathon, they will do so as part of a group of athletes who are making history in the 127th running of the renowned 26.2-mile race.

The 2023 Boston Marathon is the first time runners who identify as nonbinary have been able to officially register in a division that matches their gender identity, and Calamia is one of 27 runners who registered for the race in the new category.

Speaking with Boston.com ahead of the April 17th event, Calamia said that the Boston Athletic Association has “proven its allyship” within the mission of creating an inclusive race by establishing the nonbinary division.

“The running world is a microcosm for the world at large,” Calamia said. “And if we can just have people begin to acknowledge that people do exist beyond the gender binary of male and female or man and woman, then that opens up a more inclusive space where as many people as possible can enjoy running.”

Having the BAA and Boston do that, they said, feels “so good.”  READ MORE HERE

show full post on front page

Good News and Acts of KindnessPost + Comments (36)

Good News Open Thread: That’s A Big Boy

by | 67 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

Just a few fun tidbits I’ve gathered the past week. (Just a note, this was all supposed to run yesterday, but breaking news pushed it to another day).

The entire thread was a great mood lifter (can’t be said about much of twitter these days)

Good News Open Thread: That's A Big Boi

Brian definitely has resting annoyed-face.

show full post on front page

Good News Open Thread: That’s A Big BoyPost + Comments (67)